A Cabinet of Medical Curiousities

Ryan's theory is that a virus behaves as an aggressive symbiont in that it can con-comitantly live within a host (enjoying protection and employing its replicative facility) without causing disease and benefit the host by designedly causing disease in rival species. He uses this concept to introduce the idea that the emergence of viruses is inevitable when one species imposes on the habitat of another, such as when humans encroach upon the rain forest for agricultural purposes. Ryan's aggressive symbiosis theory attributes personality to the virus, and even intelligence. Although he does point out that a virus has neither a brain nor a mind, he writes of viral intelligence as "the ability to receive important information about its surroundings and then to change its behavior, so as to respond to that information. .. at this level, viruses are endowed with an executive control that could be regarded as intelligent." Whether one accepts or rejects Ryan's new idea, much of his book is interesting and very worthwhile. His informative discussions of the Sin nombre hantavirus emergence in the Four Corners area illuminates the epidemiological investigations that took place during this outbreak. His explanation of the cultural divide between the Navajo people and investigators depicts some interesting challenges of field epidemiology. Overall, the detailed description of this recent outbreak was informative and enjoyable. Ryan also gives us a fresh perspective of the more recent outbreaks of the sensationalized "mad cow" and "flesh-eating" diseases, which he couches well amid media hype with descriptive headlines such as "Flesh Bug Ate My Brother in 18 Hours" and "Killer Bug Ate My Face." Ryan's social commentary and his interesting presentation of disease as a driving force of humanity comprise the best writing within Virus X. The weakest aspect of Ryan's book is his characterizations: he does not have the benefit of knowing personally the people he portrays, as do the authors of Level 4, or of experiencing the clinical or scientific investigations that he depicts. Ryan's book contains only secondhand experiences at best, and his writing lacks the authority of someone who lives and works in this field. His explanations of scientific phenomena and technology are often confusing and obfuscating, including his description of viral structure and replication, and investigative techniques such as immuno-histochemistry and ELISA. Although Virus X does not stack up well against the likes of Level 4, its discussion of the most recent …